HUMAINE Emotion Annotation and Representation Language (EARL)

Proposal and Specification -- Version 0.4.0, 30 June 2006

This report proposes a syntax for an
XML-based language for representing and annotating emotions in technological contexts.
In contrast to existing markup languages, where emotion is often represented in
an ad-hoc way as part of a specific language, we propose a language aiming to
be usable in a wide range of use cases, including corpus annotation as well as
systems capable of recognising or generating emotions. We describe the
scientific basis of our choice of emotion representations and the use case
analysis through which we have determined the required expressive power of the
language. We illustrate core properties of the proposed language using examples
from various use case scenarios.